Here he's out for echoes from reddening hills
echoes
choes
No o'clock. Hope. There's a spring morning.
Throw off. Throw off. Keep only one
remembered face as souvenir 0
look released another time to
other eyes
but now to liquid air.
PEG BOYERS
Letter to a Suicide
-Jor Cesare Pavese
(spoken in the voice
of
Natalia Ginzburg)
Caro Amico,
Cesare,
how uncomfortably you wore
your name, its imperial resonance
a perpetual scratch on your skin.
Roman grandeur irritated you.
Better the soot and
toil
of Turin,
sweeter its meager all ure.
Yours was another aristocracy,
that luxuriates in despair and disdains
the coarse economy of effort and reward.
How we bored you wi th our easy banter
and banal satisfactions. Our fraught intimacies
seemed exuberant to you, saccharine our enthusiasms.
Prince of denial, you mistook the negative
for the noble, reveling in the perverse elitism
of
nul/a.
What is it to renounce life
when you have never truly lived? Cesare,
aHA HA Ha a
